Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

End Of The Line For Falcon Development

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SpaceX is throwing in the towel on fairing recovery, at least in terms of catching them.

There is always a tradeoff between reusability and expendability in terms of minimizing cost per flight. Shuttle had some notoriously bad design decisions, because they anticipated a higher flight rate than they ever got. At the end of the program, it was clear that it would have been cheaper to expend the SRBs than to recover and refurbish them, because of the high fixed costs of the recovery fleet that had to be amortized over a low flight rate. Expending the ET cost tens of millions per flight.

Elon was determined early on to recover as much of the vehicle as possible (they spent years trying to figure out how to recover the upper stage of the Falcon), but he finally decided that the only solution was to scale the vehicle up, and go to stainless steel to handle entry heating, so the focus is on Starship now, and Falcon 9 has reached the end of its development cycle.

Business, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

An Experimental Anti-Viral

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…is effective at treating Covid.

Between this kind of thing and the vaccines, I think this is all over but the shouting. I am definitely done with wearing a mask outside, especially in sunlight. Masks outside never made any scientific sense.

[Update a few minutes later]

Popular new mask says “I’m not a Democrat; I just forgot to take off my mask when I left the store.”

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

NASA’s Lunar Surprise

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They’ve selected SpaceX for the lunar lander. Eddie Bernice Johnson is not happy.

I think this is a message to Congress that if they want to increase the amount of money NASA has to waste on Artemis, they’re going to have to increase the budget.

[Update a while later]

Here is the source-selection report.

I haven’t read it yet, but I wonder if the fact that SpaceX can takeoff and land with minimal blasting of regolith, with its engines so high on the vehicle, was a significant factor?

[Update a few minutes later]

Glancing through it, ouch. Dynetics Technical Rating was “Marginal.” For the highest bid…

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Recovering

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Well, the place in Studio City kept my hard drive for weeks, then finally gave me a quote of $1200 to recover the data. The catch was that there would be no directory structure, and they’d all be renamed, retaining only the file extensions.

I told them that I had no budget to pay someone what I could do for free with photorec, so I went back up to get them Wednesday. I ran photorec overnight, and am now the proud owner of a bazillion numbered files with extensions. Fortunately, one of the main files I was looking for was the VMDK for my virtual Windows installation, and “find” grabbed it quickly. I moved it into the Virtual Box directory, and renamed it Windows10. But when I try to start the machine, I get the message “No bootable media found.”

Any ideas?

[Update a few minutes later]

When I try to add the VMDK to the VM, it “fails to open.”

Sigh…

[Afternoon update]

I wonder if the file was corrupted by the failing drive? And if so, if there is any way to repair it?

[Saturday-morning update]

In looking at the file, it seems to be three orders of magnitude smaller than it should be. It may be that it was either corrupted by the failing drive, or that the photorec recovery was incomplete. Fortunately, it didn’t have much data in it, so I guess I’ll just create a new Windows machine from my existing product key.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Big Business

12 Comments

Why it loves Black Lives Matter, and woke politics in general:

Woke politics has also been useful for firms hiding all kinds of unsavoury practices. Many firms will proclaim allegiance to BLM one day, while lobbying against curbs on forced labour the next, for instance. Indeed, whether you take the Marxist view, that all firms in a capitalist system exploit labour anyway, or the Adam Smith view, that sellers in a marketplace act out of self-interest rather than kindness, it is surely hard to take any company’s proclamations of righteousness too seriously.

This reminds me of how “feminist” men use their wokeism to attempt to insulate themselves from their abuse of women, like when Harvey Weinstein went to war with the NRA to deflect from his predatory behavior toward starlets.

[Update a while later]

Big Tech, Big Law, And Big Woke are banding together for a political realignment.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!